Thursday, May 26, 2016

Asians Americans vote Democrat because they're young (and liberal)

An interesting claim was made by Tantum Malorum on Twitter (where I spend all my time these days). He said that Asians tend to vote Democrat because they are disproportionately young. I looked into this with GSS data. The mean age of all voters in 2012 was 52.2. Here are the means for Asian groups listed in GSS:

Mean age
Chinese 51.1
Filipino 42.6
Japanese 45.5
Indian 48.6
Other Asian 45.0

Mean age for all groups was lower than for the total sample, although it's not much lower for Chinese Americans. Since young people tend to vote Democrat, it could be that Asians are not more inclined to be liberal, they're just younger.

Next, let's look at voting in 2012 for: 1) young Asians, and 2) older Asians. I'm going to add all Asian groups together since sample sizes are so low.

Percent voting for Romney

Ages 18-44
All voters 32%
Asian voters 25%

Ages 45 and up
All voters 40%
Asian voters 38%

First of all, it looks like the numbers are lower than they should be. GSS oversamples women, so this might be a problem.

Anyway, 25% of young Asians voted for Romney, compared to 32% of all young people. For older Asians, there is only a two point gap with all older voters.

So, it looks like the Asian vote is tilted Democrat because they are a younger population, but they are a little more liberal as well.

The numbers are too small to make much of it, but of the Asian groups, Indians were noticeably more likely to vote for Obama.

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